Woman on the Beach (2006)

 Woman on the Beach

Hong Sang-soo

South Korea

(I know this trailer doesn't have English subtitles.  I will try to see if I can upload one at a later date.)

Woman on the Beach, the seventh film by South Korean director, Hong Sang-soo, is about the choices a person makes in their search for love when they meet someone new. When does attraction take hold? Why do some people meet and fall in love while others remain friends or mere acquaintances? These questions are tough to answer, and making the wrong choice can lead to unwanted consequences. Weighing your options is sometimes not enough to come up with a good answer because the heart can be mysterious. It can fly in the face of your greater instincts which can cause great inner turmoil. Feelings can also change toward someone in short time and you can be left wondering how you ever fell in love in the first place. These problems all exist in this film, but don't expect any straight answers. The characters are all trying to figure it all out themselves.

All the drama centers around multiple love triangles involving a composer named Moon-sook. When she travels to the coast with a film director, Joong-rae Kim, and a production designer, Chang-wook, they spend all their time trying to be with her, even though they are supposed to be there on business to write a script. After days of making drunken advances towards her and subtly bullying others around him, Director Kim tells her he loves her and they sleep together. Afterwards, he blows her off and they go their separate ways while hurting their friendship with Chang-wook. Director Kim later ends up back at the beach again by himself and begins chasing a new girl who reminds him of Moon-sook. Then in Vertigo-like fashion, he begins to repeat all of the same things he did with Moon-sook the first time he was at the beach and even ends up sleeping with the new girl in the same hotel room. At the same time, Moon-sook interrupts them by drunkenly pounding on the door in the middle of the night.

Lovers, and feelings, come and go in this film. At one point a character may be desperate for another's affection and at a different point may be completely indifferent towards the same person. They can also let their hangups get in the way of a good thing, such as when Director Kim cannot get over the fact that Moon-sook dated and slept with European men when she lived in Germany. His hangups ruined his first marriage because he couldn't get over his wife sleeping with a mutual friend before they met. Moon-sook is disappointed in Director Kim because her adoration for him as a director and artist fades and she begins seeing him as “just another Korean man.” Moon-sook says that her greatest fear is obsession and this is displayed in her distaste towards Chang-wook's clinginess and later, Director Kim's desperation to be with her again. She showed much more interest when he was acting like an alpha male towards her in the beginning of their relationship.

In the beginning, Moon-sook has a choice between Director Kim and Chang-wook. Then Director Kim has a choice between Moon-sook and a new lover. In the end, two men help Moon-sook get her car unstuck in the sand. Woman on the Beach shows that there is always a choice in romantic relationships and you are never stuck with your current love. But is this always a good thing? It seems to create much more confusion as the characters go through the agony of desperation and then suddenly distance themselves and feel indifferent towards the object of their affections. It seems as if everyone in the film is at one time attracted towards each other but can never get it together enough to make it work. No one is on the same page at the same time to make anything last. It reminds me of a quote from a song by LCD Soundsystem: “Nobody's falling in love, everybody here needs a shove, and nobody's getting any touch, everybody thinks that it means too much.” Everybody is guilty of taking things too seriously sometimes and maybe in the beginning that isn’t what love and attraction is about.

Rating: 7/10

-Ryan Sallows

Next time: A review for Clint Eastwood's World War II film, Flags of Our Fathers, his companion piece to an earlier reviewed film, Letters from Iwo Jima.
We will put up a review for the French romantic thriller, Tell No One, by Guillaume Canet, winner of the César Award for Best Director and three others!